Building Engaged Teams With Belonging Cues
February 3, 2025 – When you enter a new situation, your brain quickly decides whether to build a rapport with each of the people involved. This can happen by design or by accident.
The same is true for your staff or clients. When someone walks into a meeting, they can decide within five seconds whether to connect. This is critical when building high-performing teams and work cultures. When we enter new situations, we assess our environments to see if we are safe, valued, and accepted to be our authentic selves.
Minds can change about when and how to connect, but you can encourage connection by intentionally providing belonging cues. A belonging cue is a signal or behavior that communicates to others that they are valued, included, and accepted as part of a group.
Belonging cues help foster trust, safety, and connection in social or team environments. They can take various forms, such as active listening, warm eye contact, inclusive language, or recognizing someone’s contributions.
The concept of belonging cues gained prominence through the work of Daniel Coyle in his book The Culture Code. Coyle describes belonging cues as foundational elements that help build strong, cohesive group cultures by reinforcing a sense of safety and shared purpose. These cues tap into fundamental human needs for connection and belonging, which are essential for collaboration and growth.
Example Belonging Cue Activities
Belonging cues help people show up as their authentic selves and feel valued by creating an environment where they feel safe, accepted, and recognized. So, whether you are a top-level leader who wants to put direct reports at ease or a frontline worker who wants your clients to open up, these are only a few examples of belonging cues you can try.
Active Listening
Listen to understand. Get curious. Talk less. Ask questions.
Shared Voice
Next time you’re in a meeting, notice whether everyone is contributing to the conversation. Are some voices heard more than others? How much air space do you take up in a meeting?
Consider actions to ensure that everyone in a room is heard. You can do this by setting group norms, inviting more voices to the table, or pausing to hear others before speaking.
Encourage Vulnerability
Feeling seen and included encourages people to share their personal experiences, challenges, or creative ideas without holding back, and this fosters more genuine interactions.
This starts with you. Where can you find opportunities to share more about yourself including mistakes and learning with others?
Vision Cast
People want to know they have a future with their team and/or organization. You can help create a vision of what that looks like. Learn about the unique contributions people bring to your team and have conversations about how those things can add value to the future. Try questions like these:
- Have you worked on a project like this before?
- Would something like this be of interest to you?
- Where do see us taking this in the future?
Language And Communication Choices
When meeting someone for the first time, ask how they prefer to be addressed and their pronouns. Find out if they prefer email, text, or an old-fashioned phone call.
You might get specific and ask how they prefer to receive feedback. For example, you could say, “Part of my job is to provide feedback about X with you, and that can be a tough subject. What is the best way for me to bring this up with you?”
Provide Autonomy Where Possible
Ask individuals to own tasks, projects, reoccurring events, etc. Make it a point to know your staff members’ goals, too. Say things like, “Tell me about your career aspirations. I’d love to support you on your path.” These efforts can unlock an individual’s willingness to work with you and their ability to perform.
Allow For Pushback
People will decide quickly whether they belong or not after a disagreement. How you handle disagreements on teams and push back to ideas quickly signals whether people are safe to share their true thoughts and feelings.
Spend time reflecting on how you react when people push back on your ideas. Consider inviting more feedback for yourself to practice opening up to a broader set of ideas. Ask yourself, whose ideas have I dismissed or ignored? Consider reaching out to learn more.
When And How To Be Intentional About Belonging Cues In The Workplace
The best time for belonging cues is on day one for a new hire. (We’ll talk more about that below.)
It’s also important for staff to feel connected throughout their careers. More specifically, when you want a person to feel energized and committed to an organization, team, or project, a belonging cue can go a long way.
Like the image above says, the three qualities of belonging cues are leveraging energy, individualization, and future orientation. To get started, consider these three questions:
- How do I want this person to feel?
- How can I connect our work to their unique skills, gifts, talents, and purpose?
- How can I paint a picture of what this person’s future could look like in our organization?
From here, choose your cues and incorporate them into communications often. In fact, density and frequency of belonging cues is really important for it to be effective.
Belonging Cues In Onboarding
When a new hire feels they belong and can introduce their authentic selves to their organization, they are more likely to:
- Share information
- Collaborate
- Solve organizational problems
- Be more productive
- Innovate
ACJI has worked extensively with our community and justice agency clients to establish onboarding programs that include intentional belonging cues. By incorporating this practice on day one, you take a significant step toward strengthening the team. In other words, everyone benefits when a new hire is welcomed and feels like they are in the right place.
<< Read more about onboarding and affirming staff in the ACJI blog post. >>
The Wipro Example Of Belonging Cues In Onboarding
There are many examples of how you can incorporate the idea of belonging into your onboarding and overall work culture. Many organizations are getting creative with how they help staff feel like they are part of the group, and it’s paying off.
In Culture Code, Coyle takes the Wipro call center in Bangalore, India, as an example. In the late 2000s, Wipro staff were quitting in droves, by as much as 50-70% a year. Leaders tried boosting salaries and adding perks, but nothing helped. Then they tried an experiment.
They divided several hundred new hires into two study groups and a control group. The control group followed the same onboarding program the company had used for years while the study groups took different approaches.
Study group one, the organizational identity group, received standard training plus an additional hour that focused on Wipro’s identity (e.g., heard about successes, met a star performer, answered questions about first impressions, etc.). At the end of the hour, they received a fleece sweatshirt embroidered with the company logo.
Study group two, the individual identity group, received the standard training plus an additional hour that focused on the employee. These trainees were asked what was unique about themselves, why they were interested in the job, and they participated in team-building activities together. They got a fleece sweatshirt embroidered with their name and the company logo.
After seven months, here were the results as reported in this article published on Harvard’s website: “The turnover rate in the control group was 47.2 percent higher than that of the individual identity group, and 16.2 percent higher than that of the organizational identity group. And turnover was 26.7 percent higher in the organizational identity condition than in the individual identity condition. Additionally, employees in the individual identity group had garnered higher customer satisfaction scores during the seven months than those in the control group.”
In other words, people in group two — the ones who were asked to share about themselves and participate in team building — felt that they belonged at Wipro. Can you say the same for your staff members?
Belonging Cues In Practice
The ACJI team worked with an organization that wanted to be intentional about building connections and belonging cues early in onboarding during a time when everyone was working remotely. No new hire was physically able to connect with others in the organization. So, each current employee recorded a short video that introduced themselves by following three prompts:
- A unique skill that I bring to the organization,
- How the organization inspires me and why I’m here, and
- My wish for your future in the organization as a new employee.
This is just one example of how to incorporate belonging cues into a virtual workplace. What could you try?
Remember, small cues over time can bring about big shifts in terms of building a culture of belonging and high-performing teams. Try something today!
